If you are a good developer and you’ve worked in bad organizations, you often have ideas to improve the process.  The famous Joel Test is a collection of 12 such ideas.  Some of these ideas have universal acceptance within the software industry (say, using source control), while others might be slightly more controversial (TDD).  But for any particular methodology, whether it is universally accepted or only “mostly” accepted, there are a multitude of organizations which don’t employ them.  There are many, many shops that do big bang testi...

First who we are: account managers and business developers at web design agencies. This process is geared towards bigger agencies, however it can be applied to freelance and smaller shops in theory.The important piecesWeb design projects tend to be unique in nature, however it is important to have a basic process that can be applied in most cases. This process is executed in a linear fashion starting with information and ending in code, but requires iteration loops at each step.Information â€“ The organization of content and data.Design â€“ The face that communicates inform...

The problem with shit work is that no one likes doing it, but an awful lot of people say they do.Shit workTake a look at Twitter Lists. The idea behind Twitter Lists was that users would carefully cultivate lists on Twitter of different accounts they’re following (or not following). These could be divided into lists like Family, Friends, Coworkers, People I Find Mildly Attractive, People To Murder, People I Find Mildly Attractive And Want To Murder, and so on.The problem is that, anecdotally, no one seems to use Lists. Twitter is filled with users who have carefully made a few lists, an...

The responsive design revolution is upon us. With tablet and smartphone use soaring and changing our media habits, Web publishers no longer have a choice but to build designs that work properly on any device or screen size.The hard-working Silicon Valley design firm ZURB has recently released version 2.0 of its responsive design boilerplate kit called Foundation, which is a fundamental framework for a one-size-fits all Web project.Foundation is a CSS and Javascript framework that comes with a boilerplate and the necessary plug-ins. It uses a 12-column grid that is both "fluid and responsi...

Inspired by a talk I gave yesterday at the BOS conference. This is long, feel free to skip!My first real job was leading a team that created five massive computer games for the Commodore 64. The games were so big they needed four floppy disks each, and the project was so complex (and the hardware systems so sketchy) that on more than one occasion, smoke started coming out of the drives.Success was a product that didn't crash, start a fire or lead to a nervous breakdown.Writing software used to be hard, sort of like erecting a building used to be hundreds of years ago. When you set ou...

If you are a designer like me, you must be asked on a regular basis to “make it look pretty.” The request can stroke your designer ego, making you feel like a design rockstar with super powers to make this world a more beautiful place. This is especially true at startups, where you are one of the few, maybe the only designer there. However, it can also be really annoying–almost degrading at times. Thoughts like “why the hell can’t engineers do this on their own? It’s all common sense” always go through my head. If only engineers knew how t...

Hi People,I should rather call you photoshop lovers, right ? We are going to create a very simply yet eye catching but sober buttons in photoshop. They are simple light in weight and can be used the way you want. You can also add some glossy look if you wish to. But these days not many people like website with those glossy looks. Here is the final output which you will get after reading this tutorial.However many web-developers, webmasters, designers do not like to use images as buttons, but these can be used if you design them wisely on a website, for eg. embedding them on a image-sheet or sp...

These days glass buttons seem to be very popular. You can find glass buttons in Windows Vista and all around the Web. Other popular buttons are metallic and plastic buttons. All these buttons have one thing in common: They are all shiny. Some people call these kinds of buttons Web 2.0 buttons. Here I cover the creation of two different glass buttons in Adobe Photoshop CS3. Both glass buttons utilize the same principles. Once you have completed this tutorial you should be able to apply the same principles and create many different kind of glass buttons. In this tutorial I give you the...